How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)

Physics and Thermodynamics of Slap-Cooking

• Several commenters challenge the article’s implication that you must keep the chicken at cooking temperature for a long time.
• They argue that once internal temperature reaches ~165°F (≈74°C), protein denaturation and pathogen kill happen very fast; holding time mainly matters at lower temperatures.
• Others counter that “safe to eat” and “culinarily cooked” differ: connective tissue breakdown and texture changes may still require sustained heat.

Single Impact vs Many Hits

• Multiple people note the article quietly shifts from “one hit” to “many hits,” which avoids the more interesting extreme-physics question.
• Consensus: a single impact with enough energy to heat the whole chicken would likely obliterate it rather than cook it.
• The realistic problem is distributing energy evenly without destroying structure, which favors repeated smaller hits plus insulation.

Errors and Idealized Assumptions

• One commenter analyzes the Stefan–Boltzmann calculation and says the article misused 165°F as a blackbody temperature and ignored unit conversion.
• Recomputing at 74°C and factoring in incoming room-temperature radiation yields much lower net power loss (~400 W, quickly dropping), making the 2 kW figure clearly off.
• The “spherical chicken in vacuum” idealization is widely mocked but also embraced as classic physics humor.

Experimental and Real-World Analogies

• Multiple links point to a popular YouTube “chicken slapper” machine that actually warmed chicken via high-frequency impacts.
• Analogies include blacksmithing (keeping metal hot by rapid hammering), high-shear cooking blenders, and the “chicken gun” for impact tests (and its gelatin substitutes).
• Some explore extreme alternatives: shooting a chicken at a wall, orbital re-entry cooking, or rocket-nosecone cooking, with the shared conclusion that structural integrity would be lost long before nice food results.

Ethics and Reactions

• A subset of commenters finds the entire premise disturbing, highlighting that chickens are sentient and raising animal-cruelty concerns.
• A linked real-world case of someone cooking a live chick on video prompts debate: some see it as clearly cruel, others contrast it with industrial chick culling, while disagreeing strongly on moral equivalence.

Humor, Language, and Miscellany

• Thread is heavy on jokes: McNuggetization, “orbital chicken coops,” “sous-vide by bat,” Gen-Z slang (“slaps” vs “cooked”), and software analogies (“you can’t make a baby in a month with 9 women”).
• Minor tangents cover sous-vide being misused as a verb, digits of π masquerading as an SSN, and HN threads as “Anki cards for nerd trivia.”